


Four Moons Since The Battle

by violentdarlings



Category: Game of Thrones (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Complicated Relationships, Dragons, Episode: s08e05 The Bells, F/M, Intrigue, Jealousy, Jorah Mormont Lives, POV Multiple, Past Rape/Non-con, Regret, Sansa Stark is a cunning little minx and I adore her, Unrequited Love, developing plot
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-05-27
Updated: 2020-01-02
Packaged: 2020-03-20 07:24:52
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 6
Words: 13,769
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18987997
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/violentdarlings/pseuds/violentdarlings
Summary: Jorah Mormont comes south with a Stark on his arm.





	1. Daenerys I

**Author's Note:**

> Jumping on the 'season eight fix-it' train.

When Daenerys left him in the North – still, silent, a mangled figure in Winterfell’s makeshift infirmary – it had not been a hard decision. Cersei needed to be dealt with, Kings Landing needed to be taken, and the fat Maester – Sam, Jon’s friend, Sam – had doubted Jorah would live much longer than a few days, a week at most. So Daenerys had left, with her dragons and her Unsullied and a tattered army of recalcitrant Northmen, headed by her taciturn nephew, and had put Jorah Mormont out of her mind, as swiftly as if she’d lit his pyre herself.

(Of course, that isn’t true. Of course she sat his bed for hours, for days, waiting for him to awaken, holding his heavy, calloused hand in her own two; they’d looked so small beside his. It hadn’t done a whit of good.)

She’s Queen, by the grace of the gods and the strength of her will, and yet Daenerys doesn’t sleep most nights, still caught in that moment when she’d almost (almost) decided to burn down Kings Landing. When her heart had been so wounded that all she’d wanted was to make someone else hurt, and it was only the memory of Missandei’s gentleness, her grace, and how disappointed Jorah would be, to know his faith in her was misplaced, when so often it has been the only thing she had.

It is moons after her coronation, when a raven comes from Riverrun to inform her the Lady of Winterfell is on her way to Kings Landing, to see her brother-cousin and retrieve her sharp-edged, sharp-tongued younger sister. Lady Arya has been a thorn in Daenerys’ side for too long, now, and yet the softness in Jon’s face when he is with the young woman… Daenerys never sees that softness in him, never has, and of late she sees not even a smile. His heart is in the North, she knows, his heart has never been anywhere – or anyone – else’s, but she is his queen, and she has ordered him to stay.

Daenerys is a cruel woman.

She knew that long before she came to Westeros.

 

Jon and Arya ride out to meet the party from the North. Daenerys has petitions to see to here, and a stack of parchment a foot high to read before tomorrow’s small council meeting. Moreover, she is queen, so she should not long for the wind in her hair and a horse underneath her. Drogo gave her that freedom, so long ago now (it hasn’t been that long, not really, but she is centuries departed from that naïve girl who feared most in the world her brother). To be back there, with Silver underneath her and the restless shift of Rhaego in her belly, her massive, muscle-bound _khal_ by her side – she shouldn’t miss those days, not when she has come to far, and yet the rasping murmur of Jorah’s voice persists in her ear, reading tales of the Seven Kingdoms, from the time before dragons.

She meets them in the Red Keep, but not on the dreadful monstrosity of a chair she is forced to call her throne. Gods, how she’d longed for it, and then ten minutes on the thing had left her pricked all over with tiny drops of blood; it is a chair for a Mad King, and Daenerys is neither mad nor a man, and she has Tyrion trying to work out the best way to get the damn thing out.

No, she meets them in her solar, a wide, open room that used to be the chambers of some minor lord fifty years ago. she knows her Unsullied loathe it for its openness, for the way that the doors open out onto a patio that anyone could scramble up onto from below. But caging dragons is the surest way to ruin them, and Daenerys has no desire to be caged.

“Lady Sansa,” she says, rising to her feet as the younger woman sweeps a low curtsy. “I trust your travel was not too arduous?” Sansa, rising, meets her eyes calmly. Gods, the coldness of the Starks, they bring winter with them whenever they enter a room.

“One might even say pleasant, your Grace,” she replies, with a sliver of a wintry smile. Daenerys forgets whatever else she might have planned to say in reply, because Jorah steps into the room.

He looks good. Paler, but healthier for it, like the man he might have been in another life, living out his days on his island and never once seeing what lay on the edges of the world. He’s smiling, like the sight of her is all he could ever want or need, the lines around his eyes crinkled. To think, that he is here.

He takes a knee. “Oh, honestly, Jorah,” Daenerys says fondly, far more informally than she should, especially in front of Lady Sansa. “Is that really necessary?” He grins up at her.

“Always, _khaleesi_ ,” he says, and she thrills to it, her first title in his familiar voice, like she could almost be new and clean again, like she’d been when they’d met. He stands, and she is about to go to him, when Sansa Stark steps close to Jorah and tucks her hand into his arm, and his own goes around her as easy as breathing.

It’s as though her blood turns to ice. “What’s this, then?” she asks, and her voice sounds like it always does, how has she managed that when it feels like her throat is closing over tight?

“Lady Sansa was kind enough to visit me, during my convalescence,” Jorah rumbles, darting a glance down at the Stark girl on his arm. “We found we had much in common.”

It’s been four moons since the Battle, since she left Winterfell. “So quickly,” Daenerys says, sitting back down in her chair. There’s nowhere for them to sit. Good. She hopes they’re uncomfortable.

“After all that has been lost, it hardly seemed that tarrying was necessary,” Lady Sansa replies, as demure as a dove, as treacherous as a snake. Daenerys would have never believed Jorah fool enough to believe it – and yet here they stand in front of her, the evidence plain for all to see. “Why wait? Not when we need a son for Winterfell and a son for Bear Island – or perhaps a daughter, what do you think, my lord?”

Sansa is smiling, and Daenerys wants to smack it off her face. And by all that is holy, Jorah is _blushing_.

“If the gods are kind,” he murmurs, and Daenerys knows he speaks of Sansa’s gods, the old gods of the North. “I am far past my prime, as well you know, my lady –” He chuckles when the Stark girl swats at his arm.

“You are not, and you know it,” she says, good-natured, more animated than Daenerys has ever seen her. The way she looks at Jorah is not the way a high-born lady should look at her betrothed. Sansa looks at Jorah like she’s had him half a hundred times already, in her bed and in her arms, on the war table at Winterfell, in that hideous room she calls a solar. And he leans in towards her, his strong body attuned to her presence, like she is the sun and the moon and the stars all rolled into one. The sheer absurdity of it makes Daenerys long to scream.

“Do you plan to marry, then, while you are here in the capital?” she inquires instead. Sansa flushes.

“We were wed in the sight of the old gods already in Winterfell, your Grace –”

“You wed without the approval of your Queen, Jorah the Andal?” Daenerys snaps before she can help herself. Jorah straightens automatically, Sansa’s thin hand falling aware from his arm, his head dipping in subservience. Daenerys finds herself, of all things, pleased. His obedience to her is bred into his bones, and yet.

“It was my doing,” Sansa says, in her quiet voice. “Forgive me, your Grace. I said you would not mind.”

The sheer gall of the girl, that she dares to imply that Daenerys cares even a whit who Jorah fucks. “It is you who must forgive me, Lady Stark, Lord Mormont,” she replies, and Jorah’s eyes flash to hers, for the span of the pause between heartbeats, his eyes terribly wounded. She thinks he would prefer her to call him the Andal again, or even traitor, than the formality of his title. But if he is going to be the consort of the Lady of Winterfell, he should become accustomed to it. “I was merely startled. Of course you do not require permission to wed.” She is not that kind of queen; she has to frequently remind herself of that. She is not her father. She is not Cersei Lannister.

She is Daenerys, and she is _furious_.

“I must dismiss you, I fear,” she murmurs, gesturing to her desk, the small mountain of work she needs to get through. “A kingdom needs must run, and I have seven of them.” She meets the Stark girl’s eyes. Jon had argued passionately for the North’s right to secede, and Daenerys had, in the end, to tell him if he ever brought it up again she would merely triple the North’s taxes instead, and make sure they knew who they had to thank for it.

Jon had stared at her, betrayed. But she’d fulfilled her promise, to end the Great War, to bring her forces to bear on the Night King. A free and independent North had never been even on the table, and he knows it, curse him. When he looks at her with those deep dark eyes Daenerys almost remembers what its like to trust a man. But never again.

Jorah bows, and Sansa curtseys again, and Daenerys waves them out of her sight, because one more word in Jorah’s low tones might break the thin shell of dragon glass she keeps locked around her heart. When they’re gone, she goes to her door and locks it tight, breathes deeply for just a moment, her fingernails cutting crescent moons into her palms and her burning forehead pressed against the wood. Jorah, her Jorah, Jorah the Andal, advisor to the queen, married. Well, why shouldn’t he? Daenerys herself has never loved him like that; she tells herself that, fiercely, over and again, until she almost believes it.

(She’d thought him dead, after the battle, and she’d kissed his forehead and his cheeks and begged him to come back, how utterly _pathetic_ , to be so weak for him, when it has taken less than half a span of a year for him to take another as his wife –)

She has everything she needs. She has Tyrion, her reluctant Hand; she has Jon, for whatever he is worth, and Drogon still, of her children – by all the gods, she has the _Iron Throne_ even if she hates the bloody thing _and it hurts her to sit on it, it hurts –_

Daenerys still can’t shake the feeling that somehow, she has lost something she never even considered she could lose.


	2. Jorah I

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Background, heavy on the Jorah feels, and Sansa playing Jorah like a fiddle while simultaneously realising he is probably one of the last decent men in Westeros and making a dent in resolving her mountain of trauma.

“I am indebted to you,” Lady Stark says for the fifth time since they arrived in King’s Landing, but oddly enough it doesn’t seem to help. Jorah lifts his head wearily, bestowing a tired smile on his liege lady, who looks younger here than he has ever seen her before.

“it is nothing, my lady,” he replies, but Sansa – Sansa, he must remember to call her Sansa – wrings her hands together. They are the only sign that she is not completely a lady; they are chapped from the winter and from her many duties, for Sansa follows her father’s example that no duty is too low for the Stark of Winterfell. Jorah remembers Eddard as an upright, unbending sort of man; his daughter has his steel, but more give. “truly, it is no hardship.”

“She did not like it,” Sansa retorts. “I thought she was going to strike you.” So had Jorah, for a brief, breathless moment; had not known whether he feared the blow or longed for her hand on his skin.

“I have been with her Grace since the beginning,” he reminds her, this willow-thin girl whose burdens have been too great for any one soul to bear. Since they were within smelling and sighting distance of King’s Landing, Sansa had been hidden behind her lady of Winterfell mask, the one with the winter eyes and tightly closed mouth, every true feeling locked away. There are rumours, horrible ones, of what happened to Sansa Stark when she was alone in King’s Landing. And it is close quarters along the King’s Road, staying at inns where they could find them and camping the rest of the way. Half the camp had heard the Lady of Winterfell screaming in her sleep.

 

The fourth night, when Jorah awakes to fitful sobbing in the next tent over, he swings his legs out of his bedroll before he can think better of it. The guards at Sansa’s tent, as it happens, are both Bear Islanders; he knows two by name and another by sight. “You didn’t think to wake her?” he asks them, tired to the bone.

“You went East too long,” one says, Beren, that is his name. His father used to smoke fish by the shore, before he was killed by Ironborn raiders. “Here us common folk don’t go into highborn ladies’ tents and lay hands on them when they’re sleeping.”

Jorah eyes them warily. “And disgraced lords?” he inquires. “Do they go to the aid of a woman in need?”

It doesn’t take long, after that. He steps into the dark tent, wishing for the light of the moon; it always seemed bigger and brighter in Essos, less contained. “My lady?” he says cautiously into the dark, and hears a sharp gasp.

“Who’s there?” Jorah sighs in relief. At least he won’t have to shake her awake.

“Mormont, my lady,” he replies. “You were…” How to say ‘screaming like a she-demon’ politely?

“Howling, I imagine,” comes the dry response, and a flint sparks in the dark; the candle flame is small, but a considerable improvement. “It will only get worse, the closer we get to the capital.”

Jorah looks at her, really looks. Her infamous hair is braided out of her way for sleep; she looks as though she has taken off her outer dress only, her bedroll twisted around her on the thin travel pallet. It is shockingly, terribly intimate, seeing his liege lady half-undressed, and Jorah recalls, rather belatedly, that she could have him flogged for this, lord or no. “I should not have come,” he begins, but Lady Stark is holding up a hand before he even finishes speaking, a wry smile tilting up the corner of her lips.

“You are a decent man, Ser Mormont,” she says, before being cut off by a jaw-cracking yawn. The shadows under her eyes are almost purple. How much sleep has she been getting, and still riding with the men every day on this wretched road, and attending to her duties besides? “It was kind of you to see if I was well.”

He nods. He is a decent man, sometimes, when he’s not deceitful or cowardly or lusting after a woman who is miles above his station, miles above his worth. “You dread King’s Landing, my lady,” he volunteers. Sansa tucks an auburn tendril behind one ear.

“I fear a husband,” she replies bluntly. “Jon has written; the Queen would like very much to make a match for the Lady of Winterfell.” Her mouth twists bitterly. “The better to keep me bridled and reined,” she murmurs, almost too low to hear. “I cannot stand even the thought of it.” It is as though she’d forgotten to whom she spoke; Jorah sees the realisation come into her all at once, that she has maligned Daenerys’ name to one of the Queen’s very own men.

“Nothing you say will leave this tent,” Jorah assures her, and the tiny, very fragile smile he gets in response, is the first true one he thinks he has ever seen on her face.

In the morning, it could almost be a dream, except when he mounts up on the chestnut palfrey he’s ridden since Winterfell, Beren comes to find him. “You’re wanted,” he says, and Jorah dismounts, follows to where Sansa is already ahorse, legs astride the animal like a proper woman of the North, her riding habit split up the sides to allow freedom of movement.

“Will you ride with me, Ser Mormont?” she asks; the winter sun has only just emerged from the horizon, but already it catches the sunset radiance of her hair, crowns her with gold.

“Of course, Lady Stark,” he replies, and swings into the saddle; the camp has been packed up in less than an hour. They are travelling lightly; there is only one cart, fixed to a pair of roan geldings, with only the essential supplies inside. It seems the whole camp is aware that Lady Stark herself saddles and cares for her mare, that everything she needs is packed into her own saddlebags. A most unusual lady, indeed; Jorah remembers even Daenerys travelling with two heavy chests on their way north.

They ride in silence for some time, two small parts of the constant motion of the mass of horses and people around them. Jorah can just hear the creak of the cartwheels, if he focusses; there are birds nearby, and the snow is not too deep this morning, and becomes less with every mile south.

“I must thank you for last night,” Lady Stark tells him, at length. Jorah raises an eyebrow at her, but Sansa is not looking; her eyes are on her horse, on her people, on the lands around her. “I was weak. You showed me a kindness.”

It was not a kindness. He’d sat with her for scarce half an hour, made idle conversation about every triviality he could think of, until he saw her eyes begin to droop. There had been no more screams from the lady’s tent, but Jorah himself had gone back to sleep uneasy, and woke from unpleasant dreams of his own, his entire body turned to stone, and he himself trapped inside it, unable to move even a finger.

“We are all haunted by shadows, my lady,” he replies to her now. “Some still living, some long gone. It is not a weakness, to dread them, or to see them rise again in our dreams.”

She does look at him now, eyes slitted a little against the weak morning sunshine. She seems less cold when interested in something, as she is now. “Most men would not say as much,” she says.

“Most men are fools,” Jorah replies bluntly, and to his surprise Sansa laughs, a little chuckle, really, as though he has startled it out of her. “I also am a fool, but for different reasons,” he adds, and she presses a gloved hand to her mouth as if stifling a smile.

“We have a long way yet before we reach King’s Landing,” she says, pinning the terrain in front of them with a sharp glance as though she can intimidate the distance into shrinking. “You have travelled much further than I, Ser. Perhaps you care to share a tale or two?”

Share, indeed. Jorah, by dint of being moderately highborn, has had his tent next to Sansa’s since they left Winterfell, but things change very quickly. He dines with her, although that is not such a great change. Lady Stark sits with a different group of men every night, her guards her ever-present shadows, and now Jorah too. Whether in taverns, with roughhewn tables and chairs or around a burning fire, seated daintily on a log with a napkin on lap, Sansa draws people to her. Jorah marvels at it, and remembers Daenerys in Meereen, surrounded by thousands of liberated slaves, who only wanted to catch a glimpse of her, or feel the touch of her hand. They’d called her Mother, but Sansa is neither Crone nor Maiden; her eyes are too old for the Maiden’s innocence, her skin too unblemished to be the Crone.

“You look weary, ser,” she remarks on one of these nights. The snow is falling heavily, and most have retired to their tents for the evening. Winter nights are longer by far than summer ones, and for all there is a brazier in Sansa’s tent, a small luxury, and the cloth of the tent thick, nevertheless, Jorah is cold. “Did you lose your Northern tolerance for cold in the East?” She is smiling, not with her mouth, but with her eyes. When Lady Stark smiles with her mouth, but her eyes remain cold – that is when she wants something, badly, and will manipulate those around her to get what she wants.

(Is it wrong, to note her faults as well as her virtues? Perhaps not. He had thought the best of Daenerys, constantly and for so many years, but he would not have burnt the Tarlys. One is never too old to see one’s heroes fall, it seems.)

“We are not even in the North anymore,” she continues, the jape gentle. True, they passed the Neck some days ago, making far better time than Jorah has ever made on the King’s Road before.

“It is only since the battle,” Jorah mutters, rubbing his shoulder irritably. He took five or six wounds, by the end, both minor and otherwise, but it is the shoulder he has dislocated five times that gives him the worst trouble. The cold seems to seep into him worse since he lay on the threshold between this world and the next, worse even than when he was turning to stone.

“You came very close to death,” Lady Stark says, her eyes no longer merry. “I suppose you do not remember me sitting with you while you slept.”

No, he did not, and no one had mentioned it to him when he woke. “That was kind of you, my lady,” Jorah manages. It would not have occurred to Daenerys. He understands she marched for King’s Landing a scant four days after the Battle for Winterfell, anxious to stake her claim. It had not endeared her to the smallfolk, who wanted only to hold their loved ones for a time before another war; he gathers it had not endeared her to Sansa, either.

“I felt so useless, in the crypts,” she says, almost as though she is confiding it. “Waiting on the edge of a battle. What good was I, against an army of dead men? At least when it was over I could make myself useful again.”

“You do me too much honour, my lady, sitting with an old man who had no one else,” Jorah replies.

“You’re not that old,” Lady Stark says, and colours faintly; it appears that was not what she intended to say. Jorah smiles down at his boots. Really, at his age, still able to fluster a maiden. Not that he did much of it when he was young. “You know, the men are talking about us.”

Jorah raises his eyes. “No doubt wondering how a disgraced knight is so fortunate to speak alone with the Lady of Winterfell.” Sansa’s lips turn up at the corners.

“Not so,” she demurs. “They think quite highly of you. In fact, the wildlings amongst them are already calling you my man.” It could be innocent, except for the way her voice curls around the word, like perfumed smoke rising to the sky. Jorah flinches.

“They should not.” It comes out of him strangled, outraged. Lady Stark doesn’t seem offended. “It is an insult to your honour.” She scoffs.

“They do, and it is not,” she retorts. “It is… _unusual_ , I have to admit,” she murmurs, and glances up at him from beneath her lashes; absurdly, Jorah shivers, like someone has traced ice up his spine. “For me to find comfort in the presence of a man. Lord Royce, my brother… they are as close as kin, something quite altogether different. And you know I usually have Ser Brienne to attend me.” Jorah nods, trying to recover his bearings.

“I presumed she rode after Jaime Lannister,” he replies, still caught off centre. Lady Stark inclines her head. Gods, but her hair never stays completely pinned; Jorah’s hand itches to touch it, to see if it burns as hot as flame.

“I released her,” she affirms. “She felt she had a duty.”

“Is that what they’re calling it nowadays? Well, there’s no accounting for taste,” Jorah mutters, and the most unladylike noise comes out of Lady Stark; it can only be called a snort.

“I’m told they have _history_ ,” she says delicately, trying to keep her face straight, but it is a lost cause; a smile blooms on her lips. Jorah can’t help but smile back. Gods, but she’s lovely, divine, like the winter maidens his mother once told him about, come in from the cold to suck the blood from the living.

“Would it be so terrible, to be my man?” she asks, and Jorah chokes on his mouthful of wine. Another woman, he would have thought it a cruel joke, but Sansa only peers at him benignly, as if the answer bothers her naught. Yet his learning that much goes on behind those sky-blue eyes.

“It’s absurd,” Jorah says, and realises he’s said it wrong the moment he does so; Lady Stark shrinks into herself, without seeming to move a muscle. “I am not your equal,” Jorah hastens to say. “I am old enough to be your father, and disgraced besides; I have been a sellsword half the known world away. My honour is in tatters.”

Lady Stark raises her eyes from the brazier. There are flames there too. “And mine is not?” she asks, voice clipped. “In King’s Landing I was beaten and humiliated, in my own home I was raped and tortured. I am the Lady of Winterfell only because neither Jon nor Bran wanted it. And now I must go back there, to that awful place –” She rises abruptly from her rickety chair, turning away, but not before Jorah sees her press her hand to her mouth, as if to stifle anymore words from tumbling out.

“I would beg forgiveness, my lady, if I have given offense,” Jorah says, when the silence has dragged on too long. He jumped to his feet when she did, but he can’t recall whether propriety or dismay urged him too. “Your honour is beyond reproach.”

Sansa sniffs. It is such a small, pathetic sound. “It is I who should beg your pardon,” she says, her voice tiny. “You see now why I do not speak often of myself to men.” It is a thin jape, and a sad one.

“I am similarly unpractised,” Jorah confesses to her back. “Ladies of your quality are not often seen in the Great Grass Sea.”

“You had your queen.” It is impossible to tell what she thinks, from her voice alone. Jorah studies her shoulders, her dainty waist. It’s like she is stretched too thin, somehow, like she’s pulled her skin too tight over all the cracks in her armour.

“In truth, my lady, I have never spoken to her Grace as I do to you now.” Sansa turns, and the firelight on her hair is a revelation. “I have never been –” What is the right way to say, _I have not felt safe to do so, not for the longest time? Not on anything beyond counsel and battle planning; not about the fever that chars at my heart._ “Only when I thought I would never see her again did I unburden myself so to my _khaleesi_.” Her shoulders tighten, and Jorah winces inwardly. He gives too much away. “The _khaleesi_ – I mean, her Grace. Only once. We have never spoken of it again.”

_I love you. I’ve always loved you. Goodbye, your Grace._

“It is a burden,” Sansa says, and she steps closer to him; Jorah could reach out and touch her in her loneliness, in her profound self-isolation. “To serve without love.” He flinches, from how close she has come to the truth.

Her ungloved hand is very cold, when she rests it on his cheek, and yet Jorah is warm to the tips of his toes. “It would not be that way with me.”

 

He was not man enough, to deny her after that.

“You have quite manipulated me where you want me, my lady,” Jorah tells her now, not able to meet her eyes. There is a Targaryen tapestry on the wall. He wonders where they found it; Robert burned everything he could find.

“How so?” Jorah sets down his cup on the pretty table. No rickety chairs and bedrolls here; the Red Keep is luxurious and gilded, and Jorah would rather be back on the road in a heartbeat, heading north.

 “I remember we agreed on a betrothal only,” he says heavily. “Not marriage.” But when he looks at Sansa, painfully thin and weary, the recrimination dies in his mouth. She’s only a girl, really, and she’s terrified out of her wits.

“I panicked,” is all she says, and it’s all she needs to say.

“You were very convincing,” Jorah tells her, not unkindly. “While we are here, I will stay by your side. I give you my word.”

“Even if she orders you away?” Sansa asks. He’s used to her tiny smiles, the easing in the frost in her eyes, from their journey. Seeing her like this is unnatural, like a doll brought to life, all awkward joins and frozen limbs. Jorah does not know what to tell her, to make it all right.

“Come here to me, woman,” he says instead, and opens his arms to her. He has forgotten the gentle words he whispered to Lynesse, lifetimes ago; he is only himself now, Jorah Mormont, knight and traitor, and property of the Lady of Winterfell. Sansa stares at him, for what feels like an age, and just as Jorah is about to drop his arms, embarrassed to be so forward, Sansa gets to her feet and glides into his embrace.

“You claimed me in front of the Queen of the Seven Kingdoms,” he reminds her dryly. “I suppose you’re stuck with me now.”

That noise Sansa makes against his shirt might be a laugh, but it could also be a sob. Jorah cradles the back of her neck with one hand and rests the other against the curve of her waist, not an inch lower than is proper.

“You are the first man to hold me, bar my kin, in the longest time,” Sansa whispers. It seems to be easier for her, to say these things when her face is hidden. Jorah doesn’t mind. It’s easier for him too.

“Whenever you wish,” he replies, wanting more than anything to have better words to say to her. The state of the world, that it has come to this. But by the gods, that Daenerys could even believe that he’d take any other woman to bed, when she has been the centre of his world since the start…

It shouldn’t hurt, but it lances a cold sharp pain straight into Jorah’s breast, as though he has been stabbed anew. It sits there with the other new hurt, the knowledge of the horrors committed against Sansa, and all the ancient ones, that he carried with him halfway around the world.

“Whenever you wish,” he repeats, and for now it will have to be enough.


	3. Daenerys II

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Here be dragons.

“Married,” Tyrion says, as though it’s a word he’s never heard of before. “In Winterfell?”

“So they say,” Daenerys replies. She’s climbed the steps to the Tower of the Hand as though in a dream; when she’d rapped hard on the door, Tyrion had opened it almost instantly, fully dressed and sober, for all they are nearing the hour of the Wolf.

Wolf, indeed, Dany thinks bitterly, sitting across from her Hand at the table in his quarters. There’s two goblets on the table, but neither have been touched.

“Without her sister or brother by her side, or Ser Brienne.” Tyrion’s deep in thought, she can tell; his mouth is moving but his brain is elsewhere, dissembling. It never stops. “Deeply odd.”

“I thought as much,” Daenerys offers, as neutrally as possible. Tyrion will get to it eventually, the kernel of insight she is craving; all she has to do is wait. “I have gathered that Lady Stark had a difficult time of things here, under your nephew.” Tyrion winces.

“Everyone had a difficult time of things under my nephew,” he snaps bitterly, but its not directed at her, for all Dany is the only other here. “A royal bastard, in all senses of the phrase. But you are right,” he says, resurfacing out of his brown study sharply. “Sansa did suffer when she was here. Not least because she was forced to marry a man twice her age and only half her height.” Dany shifts in her chair. She never quite knows how to take it, when he speaks so disparagingly of himself, how to negotiate the battlefield of his wounds.

“You didn’t rape her,” she points out gently. For all Tyrion is brilliant, and ruthless, and good at heart, he’s almost as badly damaged as –

Well. As Daenerys herself, or Jorah, or the aforementioned Lady Stark, or Jon, who can barely bring himself to look Dany in the face of late, for all she’s named him her Master of War.

“That’s not much to recommend me,” Tyrion says grimly, and drinks half the glass in one gulp. He’s cut back on the wine, significantly. Daenerys had to have a short but sharp conversation about not pickling himself to death before he is of any real use to her, and as always with Tyrion, bluntness is more effective than kindness. If she had happened to have that conversation shortly before announcing his brother’s exile to Tarth, well, then, that was simply coincidence. If Tyrion chose to interpret this as ‘stop drinking and I won’t burn your brother alive’, then…

Advantage, Daenerys.

“This… situation, between Ser Jorah and Lady Stark,” she prompts him. Tyrion nods, his eyes glinting from beneath his brows.

“The question is, passion or politics?” Dany sighs.

“Passion, apparently.” Tyrion shakes his head.

“You saw her at Winterfell. The only men she’d let near her were her brother –”

“Cousin.” Tyrion waves this aside.

“Brother, cousin, it doesn’t matter. Jon, who’d rather slit his own throat than hurt a woman, or the Greyjoy.”

“Who didn’t have a –” Tyrion smirks.

“Cock, yes, right.” Daenerys just stares at him. “Your Grace?”

“For a man born to one of the highest Houses in this land, you speak like you were raised in the gutters,” she reprimands, but only gently. Tyrion tries to sheathe his claws with her as much as possible; it is only fair that Daenerys try the same.

Sometimes he manages to look at her like he did in the beginning, when he’d come into her service on the far side of the world. He hadn’t been much to look at then, small and scarred and filthy, and for all he’s cleaner now and sober most of the time Daenerys can’t help but miss those earlier days, when his faith had been more in her and less in his own perceived ability to handle her. In the beginning, he’d been guarded but hopeful, and as time had gone on he’d admired her less yet wanted her more.

She doesn’t mind the wanting. Tyrion, much like Daenerys herself, is accustomed to not getting what he wants.

“I intend to invite the Starks to dine with me tomorrow evening,” she informs him. “Mormont as well, and Jon. You also.” She’s almost at the door before he responds.

“I’d prefer not to, your Grace,” he says quietly, from behind her back. Daenerys shakes her head without looking back. She doesn’t much care to see whatever expression is on his face.

“I was not asking, my lord Hand,” she replies, and starts down the stairs into the dark.

 

In the end, there isn’t any dinner.

It is still light when Dany welcomes Jorah and the ladies Stark into her private dining room, Jon and Tyrion already inside, but they have barely settled into their places at the table when there is a sharp knock at the door.

Dany opens it herself, onto to find one of the Unsullied, Silver Flame, in the red and black of her house, looking as anxious as she has ever seen him. He is one of the men she hand-picked to look after her dragons, when Dany herself is not able to be with them. Every man who is part of that elite group has spent time around her children, has been close to them; Silver Flame has even touched Rhaegal, with Daenerys herself by his side. She’d seen the same terror and awe she herself felt in his face. Silver Flame is devoted to them. It must be important.

“What is it, Sil?” she asks, struggling to keep her voice level. The man who was once Unsullied spreads his hands helplessly.

“We don’t know what they’re doing,” he says. “But it’s – strange.” Dany holds up her hand.

“Say no more,” she orders. “I trust your judgment when it comes to Rhaegal and Drogon. If you think I must come, I will do so at once.”

The relief on the man’s face is evident, but behind Daenerys, the room has gone very quiet. If she was alone, she thinks, she would simply go, but there is diplomacy to consider, and she can’t very well tell them all to eat without her.

“You have never seen my children up close, I think, Lady Stark,” she offers instead, with a smile she has been practising for years, one utterly free of guile. “Without admitting to bias as their mother, of course, they truly are magnificent. You will be completely safe with me there, of course.”

Oh, Jon wants to argue, as does Arya, but there’s no graceful way to do so, and Dany doesn’t even bother trying to catch Tyrion’s eye. You’re not the only one who’s clever, she remembers.

She remembers he hadn’t liked that.

 

They have done the oddest thing.

The land around the capital has been razed, the trees felled for wood to keep the city from freezing, and yet her dragons have found plenty besides. They have dragged vast trees, torn up by the roots, and heavy branches until they have made a rough circle barely large enough for both dragons to stand in, and set it on fire. Even now, Drogon is dutifully setting alight reinforcements for their circle, while Rhaegal has curled up in the centre like a massive scaled cat, his eyes blinking lazily now and then, his tail idly switching side to side.

As they’d left the Keep, Dany had kept up a steady stream of chatter, inquiring of Lady’s Stark’s journey, of the rebuilding in the North. This is not how she wanted this evening to go; she’d wanted Tyrion to see what he thought of Lady Stark and Jorah’s odd behaviour, to analyse it herself. Instead she is tramping out to see her dragons, dragging them all along with her, and the silence between herself and her erstwhile adviser like a crag filled with sharp stones, gashing at her skin.

But this. She has never seen her dragons, for want of a better word, build a _nest_ before. “Come out of there at once,” she says, not bothering to raise her voice. They can hear her. They can always hear her. She switches to Valyrian. _“You’re showing me up in front of the Northerners.”_

As if to announce what he thinks of that, Drogon roars, and Rhaegal echoes him, yet neither stir from the vast circle of fire they have created. Well, if they will not come to her. “By the gods,” she tells them, exasperated, and begins to unbutton her overdress.

“Your Grace!” Tyrion says at once, alarmed. He’s never seen this particular trick of hers; if he’s heard it spoken of, he probably does not believe it is true. Always underestimating her.

“I don’t want my clothes destroyed,” she informs him dryly. His mouth is hanging open. Jon is scowling, the Starks are bewildered, although Daenerys thinks she catches a hint of a smirk lurking around the corner of Arya’s mouth. Only Jorah appears to understand what she intends to do, but he has that stiff set to his jaw he always gets when he sees her bare.

“ _It’s happened often enough by now that you could at least stop looking terrified,”_ she tells him in Dothraki before she can think better of it. He flushes red almost instantly. “ _How many years in the East, where we’re so much more sensible about being without clothes? And you still a Northman to the bone,”_ she reproaches, or intends to. It comes out almost unspeakably fond to her own ears, and she’s absurdly grateful she’s still speaking Drogo’s tongue.

She finishes with her buttons and shakes the dress free from her shoulders, shoving it at Jon, who takes it because of course he does, her honourable nephew. His expression is even stiffer than usual. Gods, that the child of her brother and the wild Lyanna Stark could be so dull. She hands her boots and stockings to him as well, unlaces her bodice and drops it to the ground. Jon might faint if she handed him that, for all he’s seen her without it plenty of times. The Westerosi are absurd about nudity; this will probably degrade her in their eyes, another failing of the barbarian queen. But something is the matter with her children, who she loved long before she was the queen of Westeros.

“I might be a while,” she replies, and ignores the protests behind her as she steps into the flames.

She’ll never understand the magic that keeps her hair from turning to ash immediately, let alone the rest of her, but gods, it’s good to be warm again. Her shift catches fire at once, her drawers only a moment behind them, and Daenerys hears her own laughter, high and shrill and utterly delighted, like the madwoman they all think she is. She is a little mad for fire, after all. But only when she herself is in it.

Drogon is pacing, and when she starts to walk towards him, on the far side of the circle, he rears back and shows her his teeth. “What ails you?” she asks, and walks right up to him, puts her hands on his scaly hide, and then her face as well, kissing his snout shamelessly, like she did when they were all wee babies she could hold in her arms. _“My baby,”_ she croons in Valyrian, like she always does to them when there’s no one around. “ _Pretty boy.”_

Rhaegal shrieks, and Drogon nudges her with his snout. She knows he tries to be gentle, but all the same, he nearly knocks her over. _“All right,”_ she says, and kisses him one more time in farewell. _“I’m coming.”_

The closer she gets to Rhaegal, the more perturbed Dany becomes. For one thing, he usually would have uncurled by now, or walked towards her, but he stays on his side, almost lying on the ground. And he looks… odd. Tired, like it’s all he can do just to call to her. _“What is it, my precious?”_ she asks, going to his head, looking into his great bright eye, larger than her own skull. _“What’s wrong? Are you hurt?”_

Rhaegal opens his mouth and roars, but the only flame that emerges is a weak burst, angled away from Daenerys like he fears to hurt her. She climbs up his shoulder to sit behind his ears for a moment, scratching behind his ears with both hands. The effort required to do so produces a dull ache in her shoulders, but Rhaegal makes a rough grinding noise not unlike a purr, and Dany climbs down, satisfied. They are well, the pair of them, her dears. They are…

Rhaegal has lifted his wing, and Drogon has shoved his snout underneath it, nosing about at Rhaegal’s side. Dany frowns, and then goes to investigate, and then sits down hard on the ground, her legs giving way, because Drogon and Rhaegal are not alone, in this inferno they have created.

Eggs. Rough, scaly eggs, like the ones all three of her children lived inside, although these ones are smaller and glowing a little, from the heat of their parents and the vast fire surrounding them. Daenerys blinks at the first, a dull dark violet one that Drogon is nuzzling at, but can’t even comprehend the colour of the second or third – the fourth – the fifth – the _sixth –_

Seven. Seven dragon eggs tucked against Rhaegal’s side. Drogon withdraws, and Dany watches, spellbound, as Rhaegal lowers his wing again and the eggs disappear from view. Safe, tucked in between the two children Daenerys has left –

The world stops.

She is the last living full-blood Targaryen, knows it like she knows the sky is up and the earth is down, and what does a single Targaryen have need of seven more dragons, a single Targaryen doesn’t, unless –

Unless her dragons can sense something Dany herself cannot. Her belly is flat, and empty, but perhaps that could change. She trusts her dragons more than she trusts herself, after all.

Dany walks in a daze to Rhaegal’s head, and kisses every inch of scale she can reach. _“My good lad,” she_ says, before reconsidering _. “My good… girl?”_ It sounds so strange, but Rhaegal rumbles again, and licks Dany’s bare shoulder. She’s read two or three treatises on dragons, since coming to Westeros, read that they could go between male and female as easily as flame jumps from spark to tinder, that they could delay hatching eggs for years after coitus takes place.

Even the faintest notion that the eggs could be Viserion’s children as well as Drogon’s and Rhaegal’s has tears streaking down Daenerys’ cheeks, turning to steam before they can drip down onto her breasts and belly. She’s laughing again, she can hear it, but there is no madness in it, just clear, ringing, perfect joy.

There is still so much to do for her country, for her throne, but Daenerys feels light, untethered, for the first time since leaving Essos. So much to do, and so much to be living for.


	4. Tyrion I

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The latest instalment in 'damaged people have Feelings they're not Comfortable With'.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Shout out to everyone who's enjoying this fic! Thank you so much for all your feedback.

Tyrion will remember it as long as he lives, stunned into silence by the disappearance of his monarch into a den of dragons, smoke burning his lungs, terrified that Daenerys has finally succumbed to madness, what it would mean for him, what it would mean for Westeros –

The heavy hand falling onto his shoulder nearly elicits a howl. Tyrion looks up to Mormont’s weathered face, picking apart the other man’s emotions as easy as he draws breath; shame, frustration, and beneath it all awe. “You know she can walk through flames,” the older man says, but his eyes are narrowed; Tyrion can feel the tension radiating off him.

“I know what I’ve been told,” he retorts, shaking Mormont’s hand off his shoulder. “I know that you believe she can do anything –”

“No one could survive that,” Sansa says, her voice harsh; Tyrion slants a gaze at her and immediately wishes he hadn’t. Her eyes are hollows in her face, her hair almost brighter than the blaze that has consumed Daenerys. “She’s mad. Mad as Joffrey was, as Cersei, as all the other Targaryens before her –” Jon coughs, and Sansa stares at him, stricken. “I didn’t mean –”

“You’re right,” Jon murmurs, so like Ned Stark out of the corner of Tyrion’s eye it’s like the Northman come again. “No one could survive such an inferno.” His hands are clenched, white to the knuckles, in the overdress Daenerys has discarded. The way she’d handed it to him, like all this more an inconvenience than walking to her death, by the gods, whatever will he do –

Mormont steps towards the fire, seems to walk towards it until he can bear the heat no longer, and removes his cloak. Tyrion squints, and can almost see white against the green-bronze mass that is Rhaegal. But it shimmers in the haze of the smoke, and disappears. Mormont lays his cloak on the ground, retreats to a safe distance, sets his hand on his longsword and draws his shoulders back. He is standing to attention, Tyrion realises, standing guard, like one man alone could defeat two dragons should he need to.

He’s always been a fool, but for all their history, kidnappings and betrayals, Tyrion likes him.

There is nothing to do but wait. The night is beginning to fall. The fire seems brighter against the coming darkness, the flames dancing, orange and red against the silvery backdrop of the Blackwater and the last few streaks of sunset in the sky. Tyrion breathes deep, and watches the ripple of the conflagration on the waters he’d once laced with wildfire, the waters his brother had nearly drowned in, the waters that had carried him from the capital into the Narrow Sea, when he had no home left to go.

He is the Lord of the Rock, for what it’s worth.

The flames flicker around a shape emerging from where they are densest, and then there is Daenerys, as if she had only stepped into another room. The gasp that comes out of Tyrion is thankfully lost amongst all the others; Jon’s dark eyes are round, Sansa’s pretty mouth has actually fallen open in shock, and even Arya, who can manage a blank expression beyond anything Tyrion has seen before, has wide eyes.

Yes, she’s naked. That is hardly the most unusual occurrence of the last hour. But she’s naked and she’d beautiful and Tyrion is more than half in love with her, and his cock stirs. Not now, he tries to tell himself.

The ties binding up her braids must have burnt; it is loose and free, trailing over her breasts, down her back. Tyrion remembers, in Essos, that the sun had never gilded her skin; she had always been as pale as a Northerner, silver and white, and violet eyes that been dark with rage the first time he met her, when she saw Mormont come before her again. How speedily time can allay such fury, time and change; it has not been so very long since Meereen. Yet Daenerys has ever been quick to anger, but also quick to forgive.

She covers the ground briskly, picking up the cloak Mormont has left for her. But even as she lifts it in her hands, presses it fast to her flesh, the cloth bursts into flames, as though the wool no match for the heat rising off her skin.

Her face has changed. If Tyrion was not so overcome, he might think it an expression of weariness, as if all of this is excessive and more than a little irritating, or even chagrin, that she is aware it is not common to survive dragon flame intact. She drops the burning cloak to the ground and strides forward, her silver hair covering her breasts but little else. If he can recognise little else, he knows the determined set of her shoulders, the stubbornly out-thrust chin. Daenerys, refusing to be ashamed.

“Forgive me,” she says, but stops, close enough now to see the group that awaits her, with the light almost gone. Tyrion cannot look away from her eyes, as dark a violet as he has ever seen them, and the dawning distress seeming them darker. “You look at me as if you have seen a monster,” she says flatly, steam rising from her skin. “I assure you, I am not.”

The silence is so absolute Tyrion fears no sound will ever come again.

Mormont is the first to break. He kneels and looks up at his queen, and Tyrion cannot see his face, but Daenerys does not even flinch. She looks at him like this is only the latest in a very old conversation, one that has been going on for years.

“Blood of my blood,” Mormont murmurs, voice hushed, and something softens in the iron of Daenerys’ face. She raises her own hand as if to touch his cheek, but does not.

“Three times is almost a habit,” she tells him, and Mormont actually laughs.

“It is not for me to say, your Grace.” When she twitches her fingers he rises, and as Daenerys walks past him he turns, as though attuned to her so deeply he revolves around her like a star.

“Thank you, nephew,” she says as she approaches Jon, and plucks her dress from his slackening fingers. This time when she dons the garment, it does not ignite. “Lady Sansa, Lady Arya,” she says. “You have my sincerest apologies for this lapse in decorum.”

Arya does not seem able to speak. Tyrion has never seen her so quiet. “A mother must tend to her children,” Sansa says, although she is still white to her lips. “Come fair weather or foul.” Daenerys smiles at her.

“It was easier, in the East,” she says, apropos of nothing, although Tyrion knows she does nothing without a reason. “Where they were so much the source of my strength, and my rulership less…” Her mouth twists. “Structured than it must be here in Westeros. They called me the Dragon Queen from Braavos to the Shadow Lands, and beyond.”

“One wonders why, with such an empire, a queen would need Westeros as well,” Arya murmurs, so quiet that Tyrion can barely hear it. His heart jumps into his throat in alarm, but Daenerys is only tilting her head, regarding Arya with the faint curiosity of a bird eyeing a far-off storm.

“All roads lead to home, it seems,” she only replies. “If you will excuse me. I needs must speak with my Hand. We will dine another night.”

Oh. That’s him.

“As you wish, your Grace,” he mutters, and manages to take a step. While he works on managing the next, Daenerys smiles.

“I trust my nephew and Ser Mormont will see you safely to your chambers,” she beams, and Tyrion realises, quite by accident, that she is trembling, that her cheeks are rigid as if trying desperately to hold back a smile.

Sansa curtseys (begrudgingly), Arya bows (also begrudgingly), and when Daenerys sweeps past them, every inch a queen in just her overdress, barefoot in the muddy ground, Tyrion must force himself to follow after her, while Mormont looks as if he must force himself to stay.

 

 

Most of her guards are Unsullied, loyal even beyond the conquest of Westeros, and they don’t bat an eye when their queen returns to the Red Keep in significantly less clothes than she departed it in. But no, they have been with Daenerys since almost the beginning; nothing ever seems to crack the stone façade they maintain as well.

Tyrion, on the rother hand, has realised he is furious. He bunches his hands in his tunic to keep them from forming fists. To throw herself into that inferno, not to warn him first – it’s pride, of the rankest and lowest form, stung by her utter lack of care for anyone other than those massive bloody beasts.

Tyrion used to love dragons, but not right now.

The worst part is that he didn’t believe it, that she could withstand fire like the Targaryens of old, and that rankles too. That he was wrong, wrong again, smug and satisfied in his knowledge that he has gotten her to the Red Keep where she can be controlled, contained, her darker urges funnelled into productivity and positivity. That once again there are parts of the world he neither knows nor understands nor can touch, and so many of them inhabited by the most stunning woman he has ever seen.

He loves and hates her by turns. Fears and reveres her. Wants her to be everything he’s heard she could be – but also small, and dainty, and able to be reined and bridled.

He’s a fucking idiot.

By the time the door of her chambers closes behind Bronze Shield, he has managed to bend and shape that anger, the better to point at his queen than at himself. “I don’t think stripping naked and stepping into an inferno is quite the way to make an impression on the ladies Stark,” he says, voice clipped and cold. Gods, but he sounds just like his father, snapping and pinched, everything he used to despise.

Daenerys steps behind the folded screen, and Tyrion doesn’t manage to turn away before the dress she was wearing is tossed over one of the panels. His nose wrinkles from the stink of the smoke, but even as he does so, his cock gives another interested twitch. She’d been naked before, of course. But not in the same room as him, and him alone.

 _It’s because she doesn’t see you as a man,_ pipes up that familiar voice, the one that manages to sound like his father, sister, and Tyrion himself rolled into one. _Just a stumpy, laughable creature, as likely as one of the Unsullied to get a cockstand at the thought of a beautiful woman bare._

Sometimes he loathes his mind. He’s managed to think all of this, in less than a handful of moments, but it’s encompassing enough that he’s still startled when Daenerys replies.

“I didn’t plan to,” she says, and now there’s water tinkling. “But I needed to see to Drogon and Rhaegal. They could have been hurt –”

“Drogon is the size of a small castle, Rhaegal only a trifle smaller, I’m certain that they would have survived a minute longer without the Queen of the Seven Kingdoms making a spectacle of herself,” Tyrion bites out, and could bite his tongue for the stupidity of it.

The sounds behind the screen pause. “Pour yourself a glass of wine, my lord Hand,” Daenerys says, and he can read nothing from her voice. “Drink it. I will only be another moment.”

So she has chosen to ignore it, then. Tyrion, as if compelled, does exactly as he’d told; fills the glass to the brim, when she’d likely meant a more modest portion, and throws it down his throat in two gulps. The wine served in the Red Keep under Daenerys I is coarser than when Baratheons sat the Iron Throne; it leaves a burn in his throat, trickling down his gullet like acid. Daenerys does not care for fine foods and sweet wines; once, when Tyrion had raised the topic, she had only replied, “The Crown has better things to spend its money on.”

He heard once that she ate a horse’s heart, in some bizarre Dothraki ritual, when she was still married. After that, he supposes, anything could be palatable. But the high-born lords and ladies who have flocked to the capital disdain their queen’s simple fare, and mislike the lack of pageantry and spectacle they have become accustomed to under Joffrey and – he winces – Cersei. Daenerys would go about in riding breeches and Dothraki leathers if she did not have to please her subjects, to emulate their notions about what a queen should be.

He knows it grates on her, after the freedom she had in the East. When the courtiers hear that she emerged from a fire pit nude – well. They will comfortably gloss over the miracle that is a woman who is untouched by flames, and gossip in corners and crevices about the scandal of it, naked, indecent, like an Essosi _whore_ –

Long gone are the days where he could tell them all he’d give his life to watch them swallow poison, and for all the change in ruler, most of the squabbling, sulking rabble of courtiers here now are the same as the ones who would have watched him hung, drawn and quartered, had Cersei had her way.

Gods. He needs another drink.

He’s reaching for the decanter when Daenerys emerges, hair damp and dripping but hastily pinned up and out of the way. She’s dressed in one of the light gowns she favoured in Essos, sky-blue silk, diaphanous and draping. Tyrion looks at her and feels a hundred emotions, thinks a dozen thoughts. He doesn’t always agree with her, but she never seems to doubt herself.

She sits down beside him as if they are no more than two friends about to share a drink, and pours herself a glass far daintier than the brimming goblet he’d served himself. “I know what happened this evening was not ideal,” she says, and Tyrion looks up at her despite himself. “But I think I’m ready, now.”

“Ready for what?” he asks, and hopes it’s not to set someone on fire. Daenerys sighs, and he wants to hold her hand, touch her shoulder, kiss her mouth. He’s used to not getting what he wants.

“To discuss the succession.”


	5. Jorah II

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Plotting.

He’s old enough now that he’s learned there’s no way to predict the future; even so, Jorah thinks as he escorts Sansa back to her chambers, he wishes there was a way to have known he’d see Daenerys bare today. To steel himself against the knowledge, see her as queen rather than woman. To know that she is still capable of miracles, even here.

When he goes to take his leave of Sansa, she raises a dainty hand to stay. “We can speak freely before him,” she assures her dour brother and deadly sister, both who have followed Sansa into her solar. Temporary solar. It won’t do to get accustomed to the Red Keep.

“If you’re sure,” Jon says, although he does not look happy about it. Jorah shuts the door, and bolts it for good measure.

“I have never seen such a thing,” Arya says, once the room is secure. “Not in the East, not anywhere –”

“Nor I,” Sansa murmurs, sitting at the small table by the window, her skirts fanned out perfectly around her. “Jon?”

“Never.” His throat works; abruptly, Jon turns his back. Jorah sympathises.

“She was astride the dragon,” Arya says; the shock of it seems to have punched through her usual equanimity. Sansa brushes this aside.

“We have seen her ride a dragon before –”

“Not like this,” Jon cuts in. He stands before the hearth, ostensibly warming his hands, but his shoulders and back are held tight. Jorah eyes him. He has never quite known what to make of this Aegon Targaryen. Jon Snow he knew, and liked, even knowing he was bedding Daenerys. The old pain of it has dulled, the knowledge that his queen will never love him as he loves her. Jon is steady, and honest. They might have been good together. But Jon is here with his sisters instead of the khaleesi, and they had not looked at each other like two people in love.

“Lord Mormont,” Sansa says, and Jorah has been wool-gathering while their conversation had gone on; he flushes despite himself.

“My lady?” he asks. The Sansa he knew on the road is gone, or buried deep; this is political Sansa, Sansa who chases a crown.

“You have seen this before?” Jorah hesitates. He does not want to reply, but he doesn’t wish to remain silent, either. Such a fine line to walk.

“Not… quite like this,” he hedges. “But she has proved immune to flame before. When her husband died –” he bites back the rest. It is betrayal, no matter what way he slices it.

“I heard rumours,” Arya murmurs. “In Braavos, amongst the followers of the Lord of Light. They said she spent a night ablaze on a _khal’s_ funeral pyre, and emerged from it with three baby dragons.” Jorah bows his head. it is an unexpected kindness, not to have to say it himself, even though he knows Arya herself would never intend it as such.

“Is this true?” Sansa demands, eyes as blue as an Other’s, but nowhere as cold.

“Yes,” he says. He cannot lie to her. Not his liege lady by blood and oath, the liege lady of the North, the lodestone Bear Island is tied to. “And she set fire to a hut in Vaes Dothrak, with herself and all the _khals_ inside it. Only the _khaleesi_ came out alive.”

Sansa taps a nail against the wineglass, although she has made no move to drink it. “Once is a fluke,” she remarks. “Twice could be coincidence. But three. Three is a pattern.” Her eyes snap to Jon. “Can you claim this gift as well?”

Jon is already shaking his head. “I have been burnt before,” he says, his voice low. “I am not like the Queen.”

Jorah stares at them, the three Starks. For all the differences between them, red hair and black hair and brown, they have that same implacable chill to them, like statues hewn of snow. Northern fools. He understands that better now. “You truly did not know,” he says, and almost laughs when three heads turn to peer at him. They are so young, these children of the West. “Gods, how couldn’t you know? She rides _dragons_. She united half a continent under her banner – a continent far larger, wilder and more savage than Westeros. Did you think all of that was luck? That dragons will eat from the hand of anyone, or wake from a thousand-year sleep simply because the eggs were placed in a pyre? Her will made it so.”

Arya cuts him off before he can make a fool of himself any further. “I have lived in Essos,” she says, her chin raised high. “It is different, true –”

“Braavos is not the Great Grass Sea, or Meereen, or the Red Waste,” Jon murmurs, turning around. His face is pink from the heat of the fire. Daenerys’ would not have been. “Much like Winterfell is not Hardhome, or the Fist. To control so much, and to start from so little.”

Sansa is still holding her wineglass, for all she hasn’t appeared to take a single gulp. “That doesn’t give her the right to rule the Seven Kingdoms, simply because she is an able conqueror, or because her father ruled before her,” she clips out, small mouth tight. Jorah blinks.

“She hasn’t taken it because of her father,” he points out. “She _has_ taken it by right of conquest, as the first Aegon did, only she didn’t butcher our people to do it. Her Targaryen blood only enhances her claim, much as Robert Baratheon’s grandmother did for his.” But he is fighting a losing battle. Something about Daenerys puts Sansa on edge, and when Sansa has made up her mind, very little change it. That decisiveness has served her well as Lady of Winterfell. Jorah fears here in the Red Keep, it will be her undoing.

“She is dangerous,” Sansa says simply. “She has more power than anyone alone should ever have. The Iron Throne corrupts all who rule the Seven Kingdoms. It will corrupt her too.” Jorah’s hands are shaking, bewildered and horrified by the turn the talk has taken. They tiptoe the knife’s edge of treason. He will not be party to it.

“I have sworn to you,” he says, when he is sure he can speak without his voice cracking, “that I will keep you safe in this castle, in view of the horrors you suffered here.” It does not sound like his voice. It sounds –

Well. Like his father’s. “You have made claims in front of our ruler that honour will not allow me to dispute, and so inveigled me as your pawn. I have sworn to serve you, and I will. But –”

“But?” Sansa asks, meeting his eyes, and Jorah sees the faintest crack in their steely blue, a hint of the mind underneath the lovely face, a thing of metal and spears and ice. Dissembling, reducing everything down to its basest elements. Even him. Her brother and sister might as well be turned to stone, for all the notice Jorah is able to take of them. “What will you do, Jorah of House Mormont?”

He smiles at her then, the one he learnt in Essos, facing down Dothraki and mercenaries, the fury that carried him through exile and slavery. Sansa blinks. It’s another crack in her mask, although one he thinks he was meant to see. “Nothing at all, my lady,” he says, and sweeps her a perfect bow. “You will bring ruin upon yourself easily enough.”

And when he takes his leave, he shuts the door gently behind him.


	6. Tyrion II

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Tyrion is too old and too tired for most of this shit.

Tyrion grips his cock and tries desperately not to think.

Daenerys is not the harshest taskmaster he has ever laboured in the service of – Joffrey and his own father come to mind – but for weeks now she has had him planning the upcoming tourney, along with the regular demands of the realm and the assorted other side projects she has him oversee. Two weeks now since the night that she had, in the face of all previous protestations on the subject, brought up the succession of the Seven Kingdoms with him.

But he can’t think of that now. The tourney will be upon them soon, only a moon shy of the date, and already lords, ladies and peasants alike have been flooding into the capital. It will not be like tourneys of the past, he knows, and he cannot make it so; Cersei and Euron razed the forests around Kings Landing to build ships and dragon-killing weapons, Scorpions, he recalls they were called. Stupid name. Typical of Cersei.

He’s trying to wank, and thinking of his dead sister is hardly going to help. With a sigh Tyrion returns to his task, the last bastion of hope he has for a night with a few hours of sleep. Coming into his own fist is a paltry kind of pleasure, especially given the pleasures he once was accustomed to indulging in. But his whoring days are over, rather emphatically so, and all he wants is to relax the tense edges of his body enough to drift into an uneasy slumber. Yet –

By the gods, but she had been glorious, wreathed in flame, like some Essosi goddess come to wreak disaster on them all. He can still see it now, weeks since she had bounded out of the circle of fire with only her loose silver hair trailing over her skin, in his mind’s eye, as clear as the mirror-bright moon in the sky. Tyrion groans, frustration rather than arousal, and removes his hand from his cock, wiping it absently on his shirt, and rolls over in the bed far too big for one lonely Lannister dwarf. Reliving his previous glories is one thing, but he can’t bring himself to get off thinking about his queen. It crosses too many lines, and when he manages not to think of her the past crowds in too fast; Shae and the chains around her throat, the terrified Stark waif he’d been forced to wed, even Tysha, almost too far in the distance to properly recall.

Cersei’s broken body wrapped in linen and set on a pyre in the ashes of what once had been the Sept of Baelor. Jaime had been there, his Evenstar captor by his side; Daenerys, her lips compressed into a tight line, and of all people, Arya Stark, perhaps only to ensure justice had been truly done.

Tyrion had wept. No one else had, and he would have blamed it on the sting of the smoke in his eyes if anyone had noticed, but his weakness had gone unobserved.

He climbs out of the high bed, down the steps that help him get in and out of it, and lights a candle on his way to his desk. Sleep is not on the cards for him tonight, but there is always the work, to fill the long weary hours until dawn.

 

_“You look terrible.”_

Tyrion knows the exact way his queen would pronounce the words – the shape of her lips forming the words, the disappointed lilt on the last syllable, even the faint vibration of her larynx. It doesn’t make her any more likely to say them, and anyway, why would she, when she can communicate it sufficiently with the flicker of an eyelash, a silver eyebrow arched over a violet eye.

He does look like shit. The man he was at the beginning of the War of the Five Kings has all but vanished; Tyrion had been clean-shaven, golden-haired and careless, when now his hair has dulled and he can’t quite bring himself to shave off the last of his winter beard, and his face slashed in two. And weary, with seven kingdoms on his shoulders, even though his queen rules one of them by only a whisper. He is certain Sansa will demand the North secede in the coming days, and he cares for Sansa too, after all, still, long after the measly protection his red and gold cloak had once been is no longer needed. And he needs the North to thrive, to send lumber and furs and stone down the Kings Road to trade, to build up Kings Landing again, pummelled as it has been by the wars.

So much to think of, and so little time.

The list of names is very short, for all that he and her Grace had spent painstaking nights bent over it, the vast volume of Westerosi history, names of a thousand thousand strangers only a hair’s breadth from turning into dust. They had traced Targaryens back into the shadows of time, the sons and daughters of sisters and brothers of kings, dragon-spawn spared the throne and allowed to sink into the anonymity only centuries can provide. Robert Baratheon had attempted to raze Westeros of the last Targaryens, seeded into other houses through marriage, but he’d been thwarted by his own minute span of attention and the better natures of his counsellors. There are a handful of Targaryen princesses who married out of their house – _escaped_ , Daenerys had termed it, her tone bitter. When he’d met her, she’d still believed, a little, in the great grand lie of her ancestors, their power and might, the long chain of silver-white hair and purple eyes that stretched over three hundred years of incest and bloody warfare.

She believes it no longer.

Tyrion turns over the list between his fingers. It’s coded, in a cipher he and Jaime made up when Tyrion was still a child, to send letters secretly between them. Any half-decent master could solve it in ten minutes, but it soothes Tyrion, somewhat, to write his notes to himself in this well-loved code he knows as well as the Common Tongue. Jaime was never quite so good as Tyrion himself, but that was all right. Jaime could do other things.

_Like fuck his sister and doom hundreds of thousands of people to bloody, ugly deaths –_

“Shut _up_ ,” Tyrion mutters viciously, and tugs on his hair sharply to distract himself.

“I can go away if you like.”

He’s thankful, in this moment, that he washed and dressed when the sun came up, rather than stay at his desk. Still, he must look a wreck, and here she is, as clean and lovely as the Maiden come to life.

“Lady Stark,” he says, already on his feet. “How long have you –”

“Only a moment,” Sansa demurs, as demure and inoffensive as she’d once tried to be in the days od Joffrey’s reign. Unnoticeable. Unobtrusive. _Out of sight._

So that’s the game she’s playing.

“Forgive me for not noticing you at once, my lady,” he replies. “The work of a Hand is never done. But of course you would know that, having been married to one.”

Her eyelid twitches. Beautiful inscrutable wretched woman, Tyrion thinks. She learned to wear her loveliness like armour from the only woman he has ever known better at it. He wishes he could root out every spiteful vein of Cersei in this world. “If I recall correctly, you were only Master of Coin when we were wed,” she says lightly. Tyrion would very much like Sansa to sit down, if only so he could do the same, but he doubts very much she’ll give him the satisfaction.

“Only the Master of Coin indeed,” he agrees “But I never stopped thinking like a Hand. Much to my regret. It would be a gods’ send, Lady Stark, if I could do so now.”

Sansa’s chilly expression warms, and that brief upturn of her lips changes every bit of her. “Sansa will do,” she informs him loftily, but she’s still smiling. “We _were_ married. And as you know, we are less formal with our titles in the North.”

“Your father wasn’t,” Tyrion says, too quickly for his brain to catch up. Sansa’s smile fades, and she comes to sit in the chair before his desk, sweeping her skirts around her with her customary grace. Tyrion climbs back into his seat, absurdly grateful. He is getting old; his bent legs ache more even moon. “He thought very highly of titles, and other stupid things.” Sansa’s eyes flash.

“Father never saw the Army of the Dead come for everything he held dear,” she retorts. “The War for the Living has been a great equaliser in the North. All fell beneath the Others, whether man or woman, whether they were born in a castle or a keep or a gutter. Most of our old Houses are extinct in the male line, or nearly so. They have been forced to consider… adjustments.”

From Sansa’s tone, Tyrion gathers they were not so amenable to the idea of _adjustments._ Then again, it takes a braver man than Tyrion himself to stand in the way of the lady Stark, the one he hears is called the Red Wolf, as Robb was Young and Jon was White. Red suits her, and he doesn’t mean her hair. He still hasn’t forgotten the night in Winterfell, when a guardsman told a silent room of listeners the story of how Winterfell was taken from the Boltons, and the terrible vengeance its lady had wrought on her vicious husband.

It still send a chill into Tyrion’s bones. “I gather you have some further notion of adjustments,” he tells her. “Otherwise you would not be here, speaking to your erstwhile southron husband, who kept you captive while he made war on your family.” it’s almost a game, speaking to her, and infrequently Sansa will respond as such; she rolls her eyes, and almost, for a brief instant, looks her age.

“Don’t be a fool,” she replies, dismissing his words with a twitch of her dainty nose. “It is not the past I have come to speak on, but the future.”

Tyrion resigns himself to getting very little done for some time, and caps his inkbottle, sets his quill aside. His little list of notes goes into his breast pocket, and he waves for Sansa to continue as he settles back in his chair.

“You have been with your Dragon Queen for some time now.” She makes it sound so, so… _dignified_. Like he wasn’t hauled over the Narrow Sea in a shit-filled crate, or enslaved by brutes and bastards, or dragged over half a continent covered in mud and filth. “You know her as well as any man might.” Tyrion snorts. He doesn’t care its not polite to snort in front of a lady, and he knows Sansa doesn’t care either. Men have done worse in her presence than that.

“Mormont could tell you more,” he says, and pauses, a sly grin no doubt making his face even uglier. Still, he can’t resist. “You’ve had more husbands in eighteen years than most have in a lifetime.” Ah, she’s practising inscrutability again. There’s a story there, about what’s the truth between her and the last Bear alive. “I would not have thought you eager to place yourself in matrimonial chains so soon, or again at all.” Sansa purses her lips.

“Jorah is… _unreliable_ , on certain matters relating to her Grace.” The gaze she fixes Tyrion with is downright piercing. “You are not.”

“If what you mean by ‘unreliable’ is ‘he’s been in love with her since she stepped out of a Dothraki pyre’,” Tyrion agrees, before reconsidering. “Well, probably even before that.” He eyes her. “Most women would mind, their husband being in love with another woman.”

“Men are always a little in love with their queens,” Sansa dismisses. “I could sooner change the direction of the sun in the sky than that. I did not come to you to discuss Mormont.” Tyrion sighs. Her voice settles over him like a physical weight on his shoulders. To even discuss it would be treason, and yet a free and independent North might just be the best course of action.

Not to Daenerys, no. But to the realm.

“You want to know what to say to Queen Daenerys, to make her grant you the North.” His mouth is very dry. He hasn’t slept enough for this.

Sansa’s eyes are blue and bright, and they hold him fast, sharper than a wight’s but just as cold. “The North is mine,” she says, and Tyrion would have had to be blind, deaf and an idiot to miss the emphasis on the last word. “By blood and by conquest, although conquest is all that seems to matter these days.” Tyrion winces. She’s not wrong, but she knows how to aim truth at a man so that it cuts like a knife. “There are certain concessions I am willing to make, certain alliances with the remaining of the Queen’s Kingdoms.”

“Such as?” Tyrion manages. His throat is full of sand. He doesn’t know how he can be pulled in two opposing directions so acutely, without being torn apart. “I can’t know what to think, if you don’t tell me.”

Sansa draws in a deep breath, rather like he saw her do before facing down wights in her family’s crypts, with only a stunted, wretched man to aid her, and then she tells him.


End file.
